Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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As far as I know the most common name is "hink pink", if anyone wants to look this up (or sometimes "hinky pinky"). Here's a 1981 book, https://archive.org/details/hinkpinkbookorwh00burn/ and here's a short description from the 50s, https://archive.org/details/realbookofgames0000unse/page/134... Searching further, apparently Hink Pink was the name of an 18th century pirate ship; I'm not sure if there's a relation to the game.

According to this 1941 Life Magazine issue, teenage girls in Atlanta were making up rhyming pairs like this at the time under the name "stinky pinky". https://archive.org/details/Life-1941-01-27-Vol-10-No-4/mode... Webster's Dictionary from the 60s has the game listed under that name, https://archive.org/details/webstersthirdnew0000phil_l0b1/mo... and that name also seems to continue to today, e.g. by the radio show Loveline.

Thank you! What a fantastic find. This is exactly the kind of book I would have checked out at the library as a child.

It's possible I found this decades ago and the origin of how I learned this game was lost to time :)

I made a daily game version of this https://rystaf.github.io/hinklepinkle/

Today's was... the same word, spelled once with the US spelling and once with the British spelling?

Love the idea but today’s was not a good one.

for the record, i can't find any combination of those words in my transcriptions of loveline shows, although i don't have them all, and it is possible there are up to 50% transcription errors. there is 1 reference to "Stinky Linky" but it appears unrelated, "what's the linky?" "freckles" - i got excited that i found it but looking at the context it was in vain.

i have five clean references to "as a mason jar" so my collection is fairly complete ;-)

note: ripgrep 4.079s wall; ag (silversearcher) 5.916s wall; grep 6.940s wall

I am only barely familiar with the show, but people online mentioned it several times in connection with the game; apparently they played it as a commonly recurring segment with its own theme song. A web search turns up e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxA2J5W1A7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhdl_iKrVEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clmPQPvPkTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5ciP_ZRMng

Oh, then i concur with your prior statement that it "continues [...] today"; i define "LoveLine" differently. Someday i'll find the time to get "fills" - i only have 5.5 years fully transcribed.

Sorry about that.

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